Carl Sagan was an advocate for science, space and SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). He wrote the book Contact, which was later made into the movie by the same name. While Sagan did not emit anomalous radiation in his lifetime [citation needed], he did receive acclaim in the field of radiology, namely for using radiation to synthesize amino acids from simpler chemicals.

This comic is parodying Spider-Man, in which Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider to become Spider-Man. In this comic "a radioactive Carl Sagan" turns the person into "Sagan-Man". Apparently, Sagan-Man is able to stop thieves in their tracks by blowing their minds with inspiring scientific facts.

The title text implies that Sagan-Man's vivid imagery inspires the entire "criminal class" to give up their anti-social ways and turn to space research.

Discussion

According to Wikipedia, Carl Sagan died at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, on December 20, 1996, of pneumonia, after suffering from myelodysplasia, which is similar to leukemia and treated with bone marrow transplants. It is thus entirely plausible that he was radioactive at some point in the year 1995.--68.230.167.173 02:49, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Why exactly is it crazy that we've been to the moon? Just the general wonder that space travel is possible at all? Or that it was so long ago, or...? --Seanybabes (talk) 12:17, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

It's crazy in the same way that humans can build something like the Burj Khalifa, or when you think about the number of D-cell batteries in all the retail stores in the world at any given moment. Blows your mind, man... --BD (talk) 01:43, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Tools

It seems you are using noscript, which is stopping our project wonderful ads from working. Explain xkcd uses ads to pay for bandwidth, and we manually approve all our advertisers, and our ads are restricted to unobtrusive images and slow animated GIFs. If you found this site helpful, please consider whitelisting us.